Interviews and News from the Fringes

Author, lecturer, critic, and culture jammer Mark Dery gave this talk, “Let’s Get Lost: an Experiment in Controlled Digression,” at the ACTLab 2019 conference in June. (For more information on Mark, see our earlier conversation with him about his latest book, a biography of Edward Gorey called Born to be Posthumous. In this talk, Mark explores the thematic conference notion of “rebooting the noösphere,” beginning with the concept of the dérive, “a determinedly directionless, but far from purposeless stroll through city streets” that results in a “psychogeographical reimagining” that “disrupts the unitary urbanism imposed by capitalism on our experience of everyday life.”

Robert Matney is Managing Director of Stream Integrity at New Knowledge, a company that detects, monitors, and mitigates social media manipulation — in various contexts, for diverse clients. The company…

On February 17, Plutopia’s correspondents Scoop and Jon recorded a reading and talk by physician and science fiction author Michael Blumlein. Michael has published four novels and three story collections,…